As of 23rd November 1999, Satanic Dreams Software has taken over development of Scalos, the Amiga Workbench desktop replacement. This followed a release by Stefan Sommerfeld stating that he would like a group of people with the right talents, abilities and resources to continue development. We are that group of people and we're gonna make Scalos the best Amiga Workbench desktop replacement there is!
First of all, Scalos is NOT a replacement OS, although the name suggests otherwise. It is a desktop replacement for the Amiga. It is used instead of Workbench or Directory Opus Magellan.
The original Workbench gets older every day and is being left behind by other desktop systems. Scalos' original author, Stefan Sommerfeld, decided that there had to be something new, and so Scalos was born.
Scalos' goal is to integrate a lot of additional functionality and an enhanced look without losing any of the look-and-feel we all love about the real Workbench. Yes, Scalos is like Directory Opus Magellan, but comparing these two isn't really fair. Scalos provides much better emulation of the real Workbench ("the Workbench experience"), and you won't notice any difference at first appearance. Because of this, we can't include a screenshot (look at your current Workbench for one!). Up to now Directory Opus Magellan just provides more functions.
Current registered users will be able to use upgrades to V1.x for free from us. V2.x will require some sort of upgrade fee - but this will include BIG changes and additional software with it, hopefully. We have no idea of how long this could take!
In V1.x updates, we plan to kill the bugs as soon as possible, but we also plan to add as many new, exciting, useful features as we can. Please see the features page for more details.
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We are considering adding PPC support for V2.x of Scalos. However, we need to see how much this will affect the performance. If it makes only a slight improvement, we'll STILL do it. At least it then depends on others to make it even faster by porting the 68k libraries to PPC (both the OS and third-party ones). If it reduces performance due to the 68k<->PPC context switches, then we'll shelve the idea. Depending on how we go, we will either use the 68k->PPC Assembler (as seen on Aminet) -or- work on converting the source code into 'C' and then compile it using VBCC for WarpUP only! |